The Last of Us Episode 1 - What Works and What Doesn't

Author’s Notes:

1. Small note on pronouns - as of the last interviews I’ve seen, Bella Ramsey has said that she ticks the non-binary option on forms but is perfectly fine with she/her pronouns so that’s what I’m using here, especially as her heroine is female.

2. In many cases I’m not overly bothered if an adaptation is completely faithful to the source material. In this case however I will constantly be drawing comparisons with the game simply because the show is so incredibly close to it that any small changes stand out and beg the question why they’re there.

3. Also – beware of all the spoilers!

I love me a zombie apocalypse story and survival horror in general. I’m also a big fan of Bella Ramsey. So when I heard The Last of Us was being adapted with her in the role of Ellie (and by none other than HBO who have a pretty good reputation) I was reasonably excited. When the first episode of the series came out, everyone raved about it. Now that I’ve watched it too, does it live up to the hype?

Well… Mostly?

Don’t get me wrong, I was not disappointed watching it but I was also not blown away as some people seem to have been. This episode delivers pretty much exactly what one would expect. Let’s have a look at what worked and what didn’t.

Sarah and the Endless Prologue

The opening is a nice touch - we start with a talkshow clip from the 60s with John Hannah talking about pandemics and the dangers of fungi. Seeing this little bit before the credits even roll does a pretty good job of grounding the show in some semblance of reality. The following sequence is also pretty good – we meet Joel, one of our leads, and his daughter Sarah just going about their daily business. To compensate somewhat for a pretty white-looking main cast Sarah is black in the show and we get to spend quite a lot of time with her, considering she’s about to be fridged to give the main character a tragic backstory.

This is nice – more diversity and fleshing out characters is generally good. But the fleshing out in this case goes a little overboard in my opinion. The thing is, the game does a pretty good job of making Sarah three-dimensional with the few little lines of dialogue she has. We learn everything we need to know about her, from the fact that she’s cheeky and has a sense of humour to what her relationship with her father is and how upset she is at seeing people get hurt. When soon after we meet her she dies in one of the most ironic and heartbreaking ways possible – shot by an uninfected human on orders from the government after surviving all the zombies so far – we’re devastated and we fully sympathise with Joel’s grief. The show adapts all of her scenes pretty much word for word but then adds more on top. The extra stuff, I would argue, serves no real purpose. Well, apart from hiding a big easter egg. Spoilers for episodes ahead, but we learn later that the zombie fungus pandemic started in a flour factory. In all the extra footage in Episode 1 we see Joel and Sarah somehow narrowly avoid consuming flour, from Joel forgetting to buy pancake mix and cake, to Sarah refusing cookies when offered. Clever. Very clever, in fact. But the extra minutes still pile up a bit high. For example, in the game we only see that Sarah has had her dad’s watch repaired for his birthday when she gives it to him. They have a little bit of banter and that’s it.

In the show we see her steal money from Joel’s drawer in order to repair the watch, go to a watchmaker to get it repaired, go back home… What does this add? Yes, she is on screen for longer, giving a good young actress extra time to shine, but I don’t really think it brings us closer to the character. A little later in the game we see one of the zombified neighbours attack her and Joel. Joel has to shoot him and Sarah is shocked. Point made – shit has hit the fan, Joel will be forced to make difficult choices, Sarah cares about people. How does this go down in the show? Well, we briefly meet two of the neighbours, a man and his elderly mother-in-law who is suffering from dementia. He is feeding her. Okay, that’s an opportunity to insert zombifying baked goods that we don’t know about yet. We have a whole dialogue sequence in which Sarah and Joel are essentially trying to prank each other into accepting the social obligation of interacting with these people. Seems like Sarah visits them often. Okay? Then Sarah goes to their house, gets offered cookies, refuses and spots their dog acting weird around the old lady. Yes, we get it, show, the granny is infected. Then later, after being told on TV by the government to stay the f–k at home, Sara hears the aforementioned dog scratching at the door and, instead of just letting the poor animal in, she decides to drag it back to the neighbours’ house. The dog, being apparently much smarter than her, pulls free and runs off in a random direction never to be seen again. I’d like to think it’s living its best life somewhere undisturbed by all the zombies. Now minus a dog and alone in the middle of the night with something very wrong clearly happening around her, Sarah still decides to go into the neighbours’ house because for some reason the writers have decided to make her an idiot. Inside she obviously finds out that the old demented lady is now a zombie and munching on her son-in-law’s brains. Boring, cliche and totally unnecessary. Sarah runs outside and that’s where she’s met by Joel who kills the zombie neighbour and puts the plot back on track. What have we gained, other than a few minutes of padding and making a character we’re meant to love behave in a stupid way?

Anyway, Joel, Sarah and Joel’s brother Tommy (whom Joel has just bailed out of prison, that’s why he was out of the house again – random but okay, maybe it will be significant at some point) try to flee the zombies. But, as I mentioned before, Sarah gets tragically shot by a soldier after he receives direct orders to do it. This serves as the reasoning for why Joel is the way he is when we meet him again twenty years later. To the show’s credit, this scene is beautifully performed.

50 Light Grey Shades of Joel

Skip ahead twenty years and we’re in the post-apocalyptic future with the prerequisite factions in place: a military dictatorship running what’s left of the USA and a group of rebels called the Fireflies fighting against the regime. Joel lives in a quarantine zone with his lover Tess and both of them mainly do smuggling to get food on the table. Here comes one of the changes I actually like. In the game Joel and Tess are after some weapons that their dealer resold to the Fireflies. After chasing him down, Tess shoots the dealer in the head despite his pleas for more time. (To be fair, this is after he’s tried to kill them via hired goons.) Then she and Joel strike a deal with the Fireflies leader to smuggle a little girl out of town for double the amount of weapons. It’s all pretty mercantile. The show decides to do away with the dealer’s cold-blooded murder and gives the characters a nobler goal than preventing their business from being messed with. They’re looking for a car battery instead. They need that to go and look for Tommy who’s been missing for a while. Obviously, saving a family member in trouble is better justification for Joel’s actions than wanting some weapons, even if it robs him of some of his edge and moral ambiguity present in the game. He’s still sort of a greyish character but the grey is very obviously a slightly dusty white.

There is one particular point later in the episode where he uses a lot of violence- once he, Tess and Ellie (whom I’ll talk about in a second) are out of the city, they are stopped by a soldier that we’ve met earlier when he was buying drugs from Joel. In that earlier scene the soldier is introduced as ever-so-slightly-sympathetic as we see he’s struggling with his job. There’s a quick attempt to give Joel some darker colours by having him literally pummel the guy to death with his bare fists… but this only happens after the soldier basically threatens to kill them and our hero gets flashbacks to his daughter’s tragic death. So, no, narratively speaking this still doesn’t count as ‘Joel is a dark, dark man’.

Show Ellie vs Game Ellie

Then it’s time to meet fourteen-year-old Ellie in another added scene. She’s being held captive by the Fireflies, literally chained to a radiator while they make sure the bite on her arm won’t turn her into a zombie. It won’t – as those familiar with the story already know, Ellie is immune and that’s what the whole plot of the game and the show revolves around.

Before releasing her from the chains, Marlene, the Fireflies leader, has a heart-to-heart with her, explaining that the Fireflies want to take her to a lab where she could help develop a cure. Oh yeah – and Marlene is the one who originally placed Ellie in the military school she recently snuck out of before being bitten.

For the most part, this is all fine. I mean, yes, making absolutely sure that your miracle immune child is really immune and not just slow to zombie-out is smart and it also means that the audience doesn’t have to take her word for it as we do in the game. But there are a couple of small things about the changes which bugged me. One is the relationship between Marlene and Ellie. It seems a lot friendlier in the game for the brief time we see them together. It’s implied they’ve known each other for a while and there is some affection present. Ellie seems genuinely concerned about Marlene, she’s not just some woman she just met who chained her up. Without going into detail, my concern is that the absence of this affection might lessen the impact of certain future events.

The second thing is Ellie herself. Bella Ramsey’s acting is on point but the direction in which the writers and director are taking the character is ever-so-slightly off. Game Ellie is spunky, she banters, she curses, she behaves like a fourteen-year-old, but she also has plenty of moments when she is innocent, sweet and caring.

Show Ellie is theoretically the same but something doesn’t quite match. She has almost the same scenes and dialogue but due to some small differences in writing and direction she comes off as significantly more bratty and sometimes downright an asshole. For the context of the story this isn’t great, especially because it creates an unnecessary plothole. How in the world has this child survived in this ruthless environment where people get killed by other humans for nothing? She is so loud-mouthed, reckless and intentionally annoying that surely someone would have shot her long ago! I’m not saying the show never gives the character an opportunity to show a softer side but overall she’s a lot more hostile. On top of that, her behaviour comes off as slightly anachronistic. When she’s being childish and incessantly asking questions, it sounds like a privileged brat from the non-zombie-infested 21st century who knows nothing bad will happen to them for being annoying. I get it – making sure that all of your female characters are badass is a requirement of contemporary media, but the original Ellie is plenty badass already and her badassery is not really the main point. The point is the bond between her and Joel and it’s damn hard to develop that when the two are trying to be the same character.

I would like to make it very clear though that any complaints I have are not the fault of the actors. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are both phenomenal in the roles and an utterly adorable pair in real life, it's very difficult not to love them. These are writing and directing choices that I'm slightly moaning about.

To finish my little recap, during the whole incident with the soldier stopping them outside of town it is revealed that Ellie was bitten and tests positive for the zombie fungus but, as she explains to Joel and Tess, the bite is three weeks old and she’s clearly nowhere near turning. This scene is cut shorter than in the game (surprising, considering everything else is so much expanded), making it a bit implausible for Joel and Tess to believe her in the space of several seconds and keep running with her rather than just shooting her in the face but okay, we’ll let that go. After all it’s not that easy to just kill a child, you’d be looking for an excuse not to do it.

And that’s the first episode of The Last of Us.

Final Thoughts

It’s fun. The acting is really top-notch and the show is visually stunning, almost to the point where I would love to see it on the big screen just for the wide shots. As an adaptation of the game this episode also works really well, all the major beats are there and everyone is recognisable. Is it the most awesome show ever? I’m not convinced yet. The tendency for too much padding and some subtle changes in the characters may spell trouble for the future. But for now – let’s keep watching.